To sum up, I found the five candidates to be extremely unimpressive, which is a polite way of saying they lied their butts off. Perhaps the worst was Michele Bachmann, who promised the audience that if elected president she could balance the budget in one year while cutting taxes.

Simple mathematics says otherwise. This is the sort of nonsense I've watched politicians of both parties spew for more than three decades. Unfortunately, the forum for these events is always one in which the proper follow-up questions can't be asked. What would be the spending under your plan? What would the revenues be? What would you cut?

The other four were almost as bad and just about everyone promised to do something about $4-a-gallon gas, again without going into the specifics about the international oil market and why it does not fall under control of the U.S. president.

At least one also promised to keep his hands off the military budget while also balancing the overall budget, a mathematical impossibility. None addressed the nutty neocon foreign policies of the Bush era that gave us a trillion-plus in debt while offering no discernible strategic advantage to the U.S.

Nevertheless the boobs in the audience ate it up. I found myself wondering what kind of mind just sits there and absorbs all these mathematical absurdities without keeping some sort of a running tally in his head.

To that end, let me recommend a piece by Paul Gottfried I found here on the Taki blog. It's headlined "Was Jesus a Pennsylvania Dutch neocon?" and it addresses the mentality of what Mencken termed boobus Americanus. The subject of the column is what I have termed "the moron perspective," the inability of the tender-minded to comprehend where true conservatives sit on the political spectrum.

To that end Gottfried tells of a lady who sends him anonymous letters accusing him of failing to endorse in his writings what she sees as genuine conservatism:

She extols Bill Kristol, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly as the true voices of American conservatism, but her fave is Charles Krauthammer, and in her last letter I was told that “ridiculing a man of the stature of Charles Krauthammer is proof enough of your ignorance.”

I often hear from such dullards as well. That they can't at this late date recognize Kristol as a thinly concealed Trotskyite, Hannity as a fraud and Krauthammer as a one-world internationalist shows their immense obtuseness. Gottfried continues:

One doesn’t have to reach very far to figure out that this lady is a very typical Republican: white, Protestant, and churched. She imagines her reading matter is Christian and patriotic because it is always advocating wars if not for God then at least for country, and she happily “supports our troops” wherever they are sent to bring the gift of “human rights” to someone.

This woman is not socially or politically marginal. She fully represents the Protestant Republican voters I meet every day and is in sync with the only “conservative movement” she’s ever known. We are nowhere on her radar screen because we don’t have the necessary resources to be there, and from her garbled neoconservative-Protestant perspective, my columns seem to come from the far left.

Read the whole thing. It gives a good view of the mind-set of the typical Republican primary voter this year. My hope, and I think Gottfried's, is that the entry of Ron Paul into the field will at the very least force the field to actually discuss the real problems facing this country.

At the very least, his entry will create a sort of litmus test for the many frauds in the field. All claim to believe in the constitution. And all are appalled when someone cites the actual wording of the constitution. And God forbid someone sould actually propose cutting the federal government back to constitutional levels.

So we shall see.

COMMENTS: If you are the sort of person who actually takes people like Hannity, O'Reilly and Krauthammer to be serious representatives of conservative thought, please do not comment here. This is going too far over your head.